Sunday, April 14, 2013

Nudge Database IV

31.Nudge: Hanks et al. looked at encouraging healthiereating in school lunchrooms through strategic placement of certain
foods. One of two lunch lines was arranged so as to display healthier foods. In
the healthier line, sales of healthier food increased by18% and grams of less
healthy food consumed decreased by 28%.Rozin
et al. did something similar and found making a food harder to reach or
changing the serving utensil at a salad bar from a spoon to tongs reduced
intake of unhealthy food by 8-16%. The graph concerns this paper.

32.Nudge: A large scale field experiment in Austria
tested the varying effectiveness of normative
messages in letters sent to potential evaders of TV license-fees. The mailings in general proved effective at
raising compliance with the ‘threat’ treatment being the most effective. In
this context social normative messages and moral suasion proved ineffective at
changing behavior. The messages looked like this:(i)Threat:
“If you do not respond to this letter, we will contact you personally”(ii)Moral
Appeal: “Those who do not conscientiously register their not only violate the
law, but also harm all honest households. Hence, registering is also a matter
of fairness.”(iii)Social
normative appeal: “Do you actually know that almost all citizens comply with
this legal duty? In fact, 94 percent have registered.

33.Nudge: A field experiment in Switzerland looked at
the effects of moralsuasionmessages in letters (i.e. “Paying your taxes is the right thing to
do”) sent to taxpayers. In line with other experiments using moral suasion, it found
that moral suasion implorations had essentially no effect on tax compliance behavior.

34.Nudge: A field experiment conducted in stores in California
tested whether purchasing behavior was affected when prices for some goods were raised at the till or on the price-tag. The
authors found that tax-inclusive price tags reduced demand by 8%, likely due to
them being much more salient.Tags: salience / taxation / tax incidence

35.Nudge: Karlan et al. developed a model of limited
attention in intertemporal choice, predicting that reminders may increasesaving and that they will be more
effective when they increase the salience of a specific expenditure.

36.Nudge: This paper looks at framing effects in healthcare.
When patients are told that 90% of those who have a certain operation are alive
after five years, they are more likely to have the operation than when they are
told that after five years, 10% of patients are dead.

37.Nudge: This paper looks at risk preferences. An
interesting example is the premium that people are willing to pay for zero-risk through the following hyopthetical: “Consider a $10 pesticide
that produces a toxic reaction 15 times for every 10,000 times used. How much
is an equally effective pesticide worth if it reduces the risk to 10 /5/0
incidences per 10,000 uses?” Results
showed people would pay $1.04 extra for the reduction from 15 to 10 reactions
and $2.41 extra for the reduction from 5 to 0. People value absolute
elimination of risk disproportionately more than mere reduction in probability
of harm.

38.Nudge: Loss
aversion in healthcare –people do not treat foregone gains the same way as
equivalent losses. In this case authors note that patients are reluctant to take
chloramphenicol (one in 25,000 risk of death) but are also reluctant to get hepatitis
vaccinations (one in 10,000 chance of preventing death).

39.Nudge: A paper examining the power of normative messages on a poster to
encourage people to take the stairs. Results suggest messages using a norm-framework
were more effective than generic-information posters. While the context is
small, the paper notes that prior to this there was scant available research on
the effectiveness of normative appeals on health behavior'

40.Nudge: Wood et al. examined whether perceptions of
other people’s alcohol consumption influenced one’s own perception of the
riskiness of their drinking. The authors found that how a person ranked their
drinking in the context of others’ predicted perceptions of developing alcohol
disorders.

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The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for discussing research in microeconomics, behavioural economics and cognate areas. This blog is not affiliated to any institution and all posts represent personal views and opinions of the individual posters. The blog is moderated by Liam Delaney